Tag Archives: robots

The event was a big success with over 30 people showing up to hear Tim answer questions about IBM’s Watson. Here are some pictures and sample questions (may be heavily paraphrased since they are drawn from my shoddy notes and memory) from the event:

Q: Can Watson pass the Turing Test?

A: Watson has never been given the Turing Test.

Q: Are there plans to build a physical analogue for Watson? (Asked multiple times)

A: No.

Q: Can you tell us about the specific details of what you do?

A: No, but after Watson was on Jeopardy IBM released detailed documentation

Q: Has anyone fed Watson info about itself?

A: No.

Q: There seems to be a competition between IBM and Google in the realm of AI. Do you believe that the future will include more mainframe-based AI’s like Watson or decentralized neural network based AI?

A: I’m a big fan of decentralized neural networks.

Q: How do you go about getting a job in AI?

A: I have a CS degree with an AI concentration, and I got an internship with IBM that eventually led to working on Watson. I worked on unrelated projects before this. There’s no set path.

Q: Is there any project to work on improving Watson’s ability to interpret history?

A: There are many NLP (natural language processing) projects that focus on solving that problem.

Q: Does one version of Watson know what other versions of Watson know? (i.e. medical student Watson vs cognitive cooking Watson)

A: No.

Q: Why is Watson so much better than Siri?

A: Siri is not really an AI aside from its NLP abilities.

Q: What question do you wish people would ask about Watson?

A: You guys ask good questions.

Q: Do you do unit tests and end tests on Watson?

A: Yes.

Q: Are there any Easter eggs in Watson?

A: I can’t tell you.

Q: Do you have a button that stops Watson if it turns into HAL?

A: We’ve had no serious thoughts of Watson turning on people.

Q: Watson does not have ontological understanding of the world; any benefit to adding that?

A: We’re working on it.
Here are some related links to the Q&A that Tim shared afterwards:

The Hackaday Prize Contest is underway! Community voting has started and will continue until August 4th, which is the deadline for initial submissions. The Grand Prize is a trip to space, while the other prizes are pretty cool too. For example: A milling machine, a top grade 3D Printer and more down to 5th place. There are many minor prizes (read hundreds) as well. I encourage you submit your project on behalf of PS:1 or join a project that has already started. Also see if people want to collaborate on other submissions. The more we submit, the better chances of winning. More importantly, cool things will be made. That’s what what hackerspaces are all about, building stuff with or in a community. Here at PS:1 we have one project already underway with more ideas for additional entries. So far, Greg D. has started the Emergence Project, which combines artificial intelligence, robotics, and evolutionary biology. The results will be “to build a small swarm of robots, give them capabilities similar to that of individual insects, and see if emergent behavior arises through their repeated cooperation and interaction with each other.” The team consists of himself, Jenny, Justin C. and me, Anthony. The next meeting will be this Wednesday, July 9th, at 7-9 PM in the Electronics Area of Pumping Station: One.

Watson processes unformatted data, i.e. natural language documents, and not structured databases, so part of Tim’s job is to work on ingesting that data and making sense of it. One of his current projects is cognitive cooking, in which Watson comes up with recipes for us to cook and is really awesome:)

Cognitive Cooking in the IBM Cloud:

So come with any and all questions about one of the most famous robots in the world:)